8 о The Trap
H
efore I learned of M.'s death I kept having a dream: I was out with him buying something for our supper and he was standing behind me; we were about to go home, but when I turned around he was no longer there and I caught a glimpse of him somewhere ahead of me. I ran after him, but never managed to catch up and ask what they were doing with him "there." ... At this time there were already rumors about the torture of prisoners.
In my waking hours I was tormented by remorse: when we saw the two visiting officials with the doctor, why hadn't we read the writing on the wall and left at once for the railroad station? Why did we have to be so Spartan and refrain from giving way to fear— even if it had meant going on foot, leaving all our stuff behind, and perhaps dying of heart failure on the twenty-five-kilometer walk?
Why had we let ourselves be lured into a trap just because we didn't want to think about food and lodging for a few weeks, because we didn't want to go on pestering our friends for money? I have no doubt whatsoever that Stavski deliberately sent us into this trap. Evidently the police had to wait for a decision from Stalin or someone close to him—without such authorization it was impossible to arrest M. on account of Stalin's personal order in 1934 to "isolate but preserve" him. Stavski must have been told to arrange for M. to stay for the time being in some definite place so they wouldn't have to look for him when the moment came. In other words, to save the "organs" any tiresome detective work, Stavski had obligingly sent us to a rest home. The "organs" were desperately overworked and a good Communist like Stavski was always glad to help them. He had even been careful in his choice of a rest home: it was not a place you could easily get out of in a hurry—twenty-five kilometers to the nearest station was no joke for a man with a weak heart.
Before sending us to Samatika, Stavski had received M. for the first time. This also we had taken as a good sign. But in fact Stavski probably wanted to see M. only to make it easier for him to write his report—the sort of report always written on a man about to be arrested.
Such reports were sometimes written after the event, when the person in question had already been arrested, and sometimes beforehand. This was one of the formalities which had to be observed in the process of destroying people. In ordinary cases, these reports were made by the head of whatever organization the arrested man worked for, but when writers were involved, the "organs" often required additional reports and were liable to call on any member of the Union of Writers to supply one. In the moral code of the sixties we distinguish between straight denunciations and "reports" made under pressure. Who in those days could have been expected to refuse to give a report on an arrested colleague if asked to do so by the "organs"? Anybody who refused would have been arrested on the spot, and he also had to consider the consequences to his family.
People who wrote reports of this kind excuse themselves now by saying that they never went beyond what had been alleged about the victim in the press. Stavski was no doubt quite familiar with what had been written about M.—the neatly filed clippings would have been produced for him by his secretaries—and all he had to do was add a little by way of personal impressions. M. provided the material he needed during their interview by giving his views on capital punishment. He noticed that Stavski listened very intently when he talked about this—nothing, as we know, unites members of a ruling class more than complicity in crime, of which there was certainly more than enough.
In 1956, when for the first time in twenty years I went into the Union of Writers and saw Surkov, he greeted me with great expressions of joy. At that moment many people thought the revision of the past would be much more thoroughgoing than it actually was; the optimists did not foresee the recoil of the spring carefully provided for by the Stalinist system—that is, the reaction of all the myriads of people implicated in past crimes. As Larisa, the daughter of the Tashkent police official, said: "One can't make such sudden changes—it's so traumatic for people who were in official positions." It was probably about this that she wanted to make her threatened protest abroad. . . .
Surkov at once began asking me about M.'s literary remains: where were they? He kept on telling me that he had once had some of M.'s verse written out in M.'s own hand, but that Stavski had taken it away from him—he couldn't think why, since Stavski didn't read poetry. To put a stop to this senseless conversation, I interrupted Surkov and told him what I thought of Stavski. He did not argue with me.
I later spoke in the same vein to Simonov, whom I went to see in the absence of Surkov. Simonov, great diplomat that he is, suggested I submit a formal application requesting that M. be posthumouslymade a member of the Union of Writers; he said I should refer to the fact that before M.'s second arrest Stavski had been proposing to have him formally elected. I rejected the idea and told Simonov what I thought of Stavski's role. He didn't argue either—he knew from his own experience how people in official posts had behaved in those fateful years. Both he and Surkov were lucky not to have been top officials then—so they didn't have to countersign lists of people to be arrested; nor were they forced to write reports on candidates for liquidation. I hope to God they didn't, anyway.
he only link with a person in prison was the window through
But it is pointless to mention names. Any other official would have done the same as Stavski, unless he wanted to be spirited away by car at dead of night. We were all the same: either sheep who went willingly to the slaughter, or respectful assistants to the executioners. Whichever role we played, we were uncannily submissive, stifling all our human instincts. Why did we never try to jump out of windows or give way to unreasoning fear and just run for it—to the forests, the provinces, or simply into a hail of bullets? Why did we stand by meekly as they went through our belongings? Why did M. obediently follow the two soldiers, and why didn't I throw myself on them like a wild animal? What had we to lose? Surely we were not afraid of being charged with resisting arrest? The end was the same anyway, so that was nothing to be afraid of. It was not, indeed, a question of fear. It was something quite different: a paralyzing sense of one's own helplessness to which we were all prey, not only those who were killed, but the killers themselves as well. Crushed by the system each one of us had in some way or other helped to build, we were not even capable of passive resistance. Our submissiveness only spurred on those who actively served the system. How can we escape the vicious circle?